Prior to the advent of intrusive CCTV, herpetologists would rely on survivors’ first-hand accounts of snakes climbing into beds at night, especially the highly venomous, hiss-less, light-bite kraits. But thanks to live monitoring, aimed at burglars, etc., two pieces of footage have emerged back-to-back of intruder serpents. The horror, as well as the sheer drama of the filmed encounters, evokes the proverbial ‘awaking to a nightmare’.
A perplexed Singh sent their video to me. it struck me that their occurrence in Morni was unusual While recognising them as martens. “This species is expected to be found in the entire Shivalik Hills belt relevant for us. Both Morni Hills and Kalesar fit the bill for the marten.
I sought Prof Gurpartap Singh’s command over natural history to ascertain the number of marten sightings in Haryana prior to Sohan’s chance discovery at the end of August 2026.
That said, no museum record was found from Haryana,” Prof Singh told this writer.
After that, came footage from a more alluring scene. A krait climbed onto the bed of a shop assistant in a liquor shop in Fatehabad, Haryana. The worker had a bottle of liquor next to him while slumbering in the sweet dreams induced by Bacchus. He turned around in his sleep and the krait, which was slithering along his back, started to wriggle violently to avoid being crushed. The assistant, jerked out of his dreams, discovered the krait. But such is the courage that several pegs lend to a man that he sat coolly on his bed watching the petrified krait slip off the bed. No bites, again.
